Publisher: Anchor
Authors: Richard Preston
List Price: $7.99
Amazon Price: $7.99
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Reviews:
Summary: Not the Hottest Read, But Interesting Nonetheless
I got through this book in a day, so in terms of readability and overall interest of subject matter, this book is top-notch. Preston does a remarkable job of documenting the rise of particular strains of Ebola and Marburg and provides a great description of the way that people who encounter Level 4 Bioagents function when dealing with somehting dangerous. I learned oodles about the way new filoviruses grow and how quickly they can affect a monbkey or human population. My major problem was the 'story' itself. When Preston switches gears and moves away from a chronology of particular cases to the meat of the book, an account of the discovery of Ebola Reston, the build-up and climax is underwhelming. He attempts to create the kind of drama you find in a Stephen King novel (someone who endorses the book with a quote on the backcover), but fails because fo the restrictions of non-ficiton. The book would have been far more powerful if he had kept the same tone and pacing at the beginning of the book, chronicling and chrating the dangers of the virus instead of trying to give us the way the virus affected the people and families involved with controlling the outbreak.
Summary: The scariest book ever written!
Awesome Book! But you will never want to enter a public place again, the scariest thing about this book is the fact that it is true!
Summary: Meh
Jesus, talk about the little girl crying "wolf." When I picked up this book, I expected to read a truly terrifying tale about how people got sick with a horrifying disease that no one knew/knows how to deal with. What I got instead was a lot of perseverating and a lot of emotional presumption.
The book starts out promisingly, even if Preston surrenders freely to flowery prose. We're given the account of Charles Monet, one of the first documented cases of the Ebola virus. From there on, Preston gives a description of the virus, what it does, how it does it - the works. Then, he moves on to the Human Component, the cast of characters, so to speak, for the big story.
The big story is, alas, not so impressive. It's a case of an Ebola outbreak amongst a shipment of monkeys that everyone thinks is going to cause awful problems to come about, but nothing of the sort happens. Basically, people run around in bio-hazard gear, fret a lot, and monkeys die. In between, Preston manages to surpass his self-indulgence to talk about other cases of the Ebola virus, cases of people being infected, "crashing and bleeding out," cases that are a lot more interesting than a shipment of monkeys, unless you're a PETA type.
The worst thing about The Hot Zone is just how self-indulgent Preston is. He starts to novelize his subjects a few chapters into the book, which is a noble idea, but not when they don't die at the end. Basically, he's trying to make you care about these people, and all for naught. And by the time that you're supposed to be truly concerned, you actually WANT them to die, because you're tired of hearing about him describe, in active detail, what they eat in the morning, what they do in the afternoon, and how they lie in bed with their spouses at night. When you're addressing a subject as fascinating as a Level 4 virus, why are you spending time talking about Nancy Jaax's hands and karate prowess? Moreover, when you've finally gotten to the monkeys, why are you talking about what kind of monkeys they are and how they dwell in the wild? Does anyone really care?
I wish I could say that this book moved me in ways other than to reverse my peristalsis, but I can't. Preston's ornate metaphors that pepper almost every page of this book are tiresome and unnecessary; he had the chance to write a compact little thriller about an averted crisis of global proportions, but he instead chose to "get into the minds" of his subjects. And what a bore that became. There were only two redeeming aspects of this book: one was the description of the African, human Ebola victims, and the other was the description of the virus itself, although, again, both were sabotaged by Preston's inability to write.
If you want to know something about Ebola, go get An Idiot's Guide to Dangerous Diseases and Epidemics. If you're pining for the namby-pambiness of the Human Element, read The Hot Zone. Personally, I like to avoid rereading the Uncle Tom's Cabins of scientific accounting.
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